the european renaissance and the new world 373
natural law – a position he justified in his autobiography, composed just
before his suicide in 1640.^13
Equally ineffectual in the development of Judaism in his own time,
despite his importance in the wider history of European thought as a
precursor of the Enlightenment which was to sweep through western
Europe in the following century and later Jewish appropriations of his
image as the ‘first modern Jew’, was Uriel Acosta’s much younger con-
temporary Baruch Spinoza. Aged eight when Acosta died, Spinoza came
from a Portuguese Marrano family settled in Amsterdam. He had a
traditional Jewish education in the Spanish and Portuguese community,
gaining outstanding knowledge of the Bible and the Hebrew language.
In contrast to Acosta, Spinoza came from a wealthy merchant family
and in any case could support himself as a lens- grinder (an occupation
which may have contributed to his death from consumption in 1677 at
the age of only forty- five). In his Tractatus Theologico‑ Politicus, Spin-
oza developed a critique not just of Judaism but of all supernatural
religion, insisting that everything must be judged by reason, and that
miracles are therefore not possible. Accused by his enemies of atheism,
Spinoza in fact argued that all nature is governed by the eternal and
necessary decrees of God. In his Ethics, he concluded that everything in
the world is indeed an aspect of God, a form of pantheism which denied
any possibility of revelatory knowledge and undermined the basic in -
gredients of both Jewish and Christian cosmologies. On this basis, study
of the Bible must also use the same scientific tools of analysis employed
to understand nature. Excommunicated by his own community in
Amsterdam at the age of twenty- four after he had denied that the Pen-
tateuch could have been written by Moses, Spinoza lived, as far as he
could, a quiet life of contemplation in the Hague away from public
affairs, despite the frequent attacks on him, from all sides of Christian-
ity as well as Judaism, for his notorious writings. By the end of his life
most of his friends were Christians, although he himself abhorred the
prospect of conversion to Christianity and contrived, most unusually in
his age, to avoid belonging to any religious group at all.^14
The pressures to conform were in general less for Jews living in the
Islamic empire of the Ottomans. Most impressive was the career of Don
Joseph Nasi, born into a wealthy Marrano family in Portugal in c. 1524,
who left Lisbon for Antwerp as a teenager in 1537, and after many
travels around Europe eventually became a close intimate in Constan-
tinople of the sultan Selim III, who ascended to the throne in 1566.
Appointed duke of the island of Naxos, Joseph and his equally